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22 Teaching Minds
and giving grades is certainly not a paradigm that any parent would
use. You don’t grade your child on speaking ability; you help her speak
better. If it takes longer to do that, then it does. Even the DMV doesn’t
care about effective teaching. It doesn’t give grades, just licenses. Can
you do it well? is the question the DMV is charged with answering. But
can you do it well? isn’t a meaningful question in the top universities
because there is typically nothing, other than research, that anyone is
really being taught to do.
This leaves us in a quandary when it comes to understanding what
it means to teach well. Here is the Ivy League professor again:
People need to learn to generalize the information that they are
given. They need to learn how to think about content in order
to see how that content may or may not be true for them. We do
not do that here. Instead we teach that this is the way it is done.
We have kids at mediocre universities who don’t know the
facts and then we have kids at the good schools who know the
facts but very few who know that those facts are not necessarily
true. We need a different approach to knowledge than we
currently have. By having students memorize the facts, it makes
it seem as if the facts are truer than they actually are. We need to
teach students to attack the facts and not to replace them with
other facts.
If facts are taught here in this way, and we are setting the
standard, then we have a problem. Some faculty here actually do
teach in this way, but it is not the main culture. Even the hard-
core facts, like dates, are arguable. Students are not taught to use
the information they have to question other information.
If we are teaching something where there are no performance mea-
sures, then effectiveness cannot be gauged. If the performance mea-
surement is based on an exam, this likely would not reflect on the
teacher’s ability at all. Some students do well on exams and others
don’t, even though they all hear exactly the same lectures. And, when
there are performance measures, it is not always clear that it was the
teacher who was in any way responsible for the success of the students
(or their failure).
So what is effective teaching?
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